1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to text comparison programs and, in particular, to a system and method for comparing text generated in association with a computer speech recognition systems.
2. Background Art
Speech recognition programs are well known in the art. While these programs are ultimately useful in automatically converting speech into text, many users are dissuaded from using these programs because they require each user to spend a significant amount of time training the system. Usually this training begins by having each user read a series of pre-selected materials for approximately 20 minutes. Then, as the user continues to use the program, as words are improperly transcribed the user is expected to stop and train the program as to the intended word thus advancing the ultimate accuracy of the acoustic model. Unfortunately, most professionals (doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers) and business executive are unwilling to spend the time developing the necessary acoustic model to truly benefit from the automated transcription.
In response to this problem in the art, the assignee of the present application has previously filed a patent application directed to a system that offers expedited training of speech recognition programs. As an associated part of that system Applicant provided a simplified means for providing verbatim text files for training the aural parameters (i.e. speech files, acoustic model and/or language model) of a speech recognition portion of the system.
In this previous disclosure, Applicant utilized a common text comparison technique. While this approach generally works reasonably, in some instances the basic text comparison techniques do not work well in conjunction with text generated by a speech recognition program. For instance, speech recognition program occasionally produce text combining or altogether omitting certain spoken words. In such instances, it is extremely complicated to use standard text comparison programs to support the automated training of a speech recognition engine.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a text comparison program capable of handling the types of errors commonly produced by speech recognition program speech to text conversions.
These and other objects will be apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the present drawings, specification and claims before them.